The PR, Issue Two


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Poet's Pantoum

The poet's reading or else heating water for tea
her pen is eager for the present
faces are moving, life is feeling
and what is in the cabinet

Her pen is eager for the present
this is unusual, her dream really
and what is in the cabinet
for those dearest to the leaves?

This is unusual, her dream really
of a duck & sweet-faced Buddha
for those dearest to the leaves
my connoisseurs of comma.

Of a duck & sweet-faced Buddha
she pays homage to John & Anne
yes, my connoisseurs of comma
the poet writes the word oblivion.

She pays homage to John & Anne
that is why her poem is shining
the poet writes the word oblivion
& the duck, trapped in silver storm, is dying.

That is why her poem is shining
unless locked in little dream, it's night
& the duck, trapped in silver storm, is dying
for they know what it looks like.

Unless locked in little dream, it's night
some blunt jab at reason we have fusion
for they know what it looks like
& they must have motion.

Some blunt jab at reason we have fusion
that is why her poem is shining
for they must have motion:
the poet's reading or else heating water for tea.

Epithalamium


I made a marriage of mind and body

a horseshoe a charm

a new book


I hope I live my story

be your Eve

and turn this all into metaphor.

_________________________________________


As for her

may she find another

boyfriend.

1. Sing:
if in pieces
we are accurate
here
the 'we' accrues

*

Green moves through
the tops of trees

and she is watching herself
shake the day's stuff off

lighter greens as each of
which includes a grey:

she wishes for a bath
some tea, clear water

and among the greys, or
beyond them, waning

she wishes for peace,
peace of god and

finely into white, there is
one white spot,

she feels calm,
without distress, still

ruhe, peace; ruhig, peaceful,
quiet

it could be an egret
or a crane
of the water
where it meets
a strip of sand
____________

From H.D.'s NOTES ON THOUGHT AND VISION (City Lights, 1982)

Normal consciousness, pricks of everyday
discomfort, jealousy and despair and various
forms of unhappiness that are the invariable
accompaniment of any true, deep relationship,
all this may be symbolized by a thistle.

There are two ways of escaping the pain
and despair of life, and of the rarest, most
subtle dangerous and ensnaring gift that life
can bring us, relationship with another person--
love.

One way is to kill that love in one's heart.
To kill love--to kill life.

The other way is to accept that love, to accept
the snare, to accept the pricks, the thistle.

To accept life--but that is dangerous.

It is also dangerous not to accept life.

To every man and woman in the world it is given
at some time or another, in some form or another,
to make the choice.

Every man and woman is free to accept or deny
life--to accept or reject this questionable gift--
this thistle.

*

And in memory of Robert Creeley
who died on March 30, 2005--

Water Music

The words are a beautiful music.
The words bounce like in water.

Water music,
loud in the clearing

off the boats,
birds, leaves.

They look for a place
to sit and eat--

no meaning,
no point.

*
Kore

As I was walking
I came upon
chance walking
the same road upon.

As I sat down
by chance to move
later
if and as I might,

light the wood was,
light and green,
and what I saw
before I had not seen.

It was a lady
accompanied
by goat men
leading her.

Her hair held earth.
Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
made her move.

"O love,
where are you
leading
me now?"

Tuesday, March 29, 2005
East Meets West/ Professor Bhanu Kapil
Naropa University
Renee Zepeda

Watching Monsoon Wedding In Conjunction With Awakening the Heart:
East/West Approaches To The Healing Relationship (21 Points)

1. Scene: The TV station where the boyfriend of Aditi works:
“Just because India has gone global, should we embrace everything? What about our ancient culture, our tradition, our values? This is not America, this is India.” Aditi takes a taxi to visit the station (she doesn’t drive herself).

Conflict: The struggle to maintain Indian identity amidst globalization.

2. Alice the long-haired maid and her marigolds, a red dot in the middle of her forehead—the third eye or intuition?—she spills the glasses near the feet of her future husband. She wears a red sari, kohl drawn around her eyes. The sequence progresses slowly, nostalgic Indian music: foreshadowing of their romance. The romance of the servants.

3. Namaste: I honor the light within you. The greeting of the families at the engagement. The arranged engagement. The bride is so “fair and lovely,” the grandmother proclaims.

4. “He wants the White House theme for his daughter’s wedding.” Emulation of Western practices, styles.

5. “America makes everyone quit smoking,” says father of the bride offering rejected cigars.

From Trungpa’s chapter in Awakening the Heart:

Patients should experience a sense of wholesomeness vibrating from you. If they
do, they will be attracted to you. Usually, insanity is based on aggression,
rejecting oneself or one’s world. People feel they have been cut off from
communication with the world, that the world rejected them. Either they have
isolated themselves, or they feel that the world is isolating them. So if there is
some compassion radiating from your very presence when you walk in to a room
and sit down with people, if there is gentleness and willingness to include them,
that is the preliminary stage of healing. Healing comes from a sense of
reasonability, gentleness, and full human-beingness. That goes a long way.

[6]

7. Sequence of shots with music of the streets of Delhi during monsoon season. Children everywhere, a shot of a little boy lifting his foot as water pours out of his shoe. Is monsoon season favorable for weddings?

8. “America is going to be new for me. I can’t wait to leave Delhi,” says Aditi to her fiance.

9. The women gather for the bride’s shower to paint her palms with henna and sing songs about the choosing of a wife—not the fat one—the one who is fair.

10.Ria sleeps with a book of Tagore near her pillow.

From Trungpa’s chapter “Becoming A Full Human Being:”

It is necessary to work patiently with others, all the time. That is what I do with my students: I never give up on them. No matter what problems they come up with, I still say the same thing: just keep going. If you have patience with people, they slowly change. You do have some effect on them if you are radiating your sanity. They will begin to take notice, although of course they don’t want to let anybody know. They just say, “Nothing has changed.” But don’t give up. Something happens if you take your time. It works! (131)

11. The son of the family doesn’t want to go to boarding school—his father wants to toughen him up, doesn’t want him to be an entertainer (the word for entertainer in Hindi is derogatory?)

12. Cows in the reunion scene between fiancees, walking away as the bride is walking away in tears for her transgression. She is too pretty to let go; the well-spoken, handsome husband wants the reunion.

13. Regional critiques: “In my opinion, Punjabis are way too ostentatious.” “In my opinion, Bengalis are way too pretentious.”

14. “You are such a bloody feelunky,” says the dancer to the Austrailian-accented Indian (The Idiot) because he doesn’t know the traditional Indian music to dance with her.

15. At the engagement party the bride wears a beautiful sea-blue silk blouse and slacks. Her hair appears to be dyed reddish. Her fiancee pulls her away to the balcony for kisses. “We will talk all night,” he says. “Why would you want to talk,” she answers.

[16]

17. The characters sometimes speak the same sentence partly in Hindi and partly in English.

18. The eating of marigolds seems symbolic of the marriage rites, relinquishing virginity. The same marigolds that the father steps on in the very first scene.

19. The married servants are allowed to join the upper-middle-class wedding party. The men in the upper class wear pink turbans. The women wear red and sparkling dots on their foreheads.

20. A long-lost American-looking son with glasses arrives from faraway—Ria looks curiously at him.

21. Ending credits: “We are like that only/ 40 locations, 30 days/ Exactly & approximately.”
(2001, Mirabai Films)


Comments: Monsoon Wedding was worth watching three times in a seven-day timespan. It is really no wonder that it won the Golden Lion award from the Venice film festival in 2001. Mira Nair, the director and producer, is admirable for making such seemingly chaotic events cohere and for the fluid movement of one scene to the next, the intercutting of “street-scenes” and “family scenes.”

Said 2002 reviewer Emma French, “Nair’s hand-held camera work generally succeeds in creating a sense of intimacy and intense observation of family quirks and secrets. A pace nearly as frenetic as that of Moulin Rouge assists the film’s reliance on a sensual explosion of images and beauty. The climactic nuptials enable Nair to draw together all the intricate strands of plotting and imagery, providing an extraordinary rain-soaked outpouring of pure joy.”

I relived the joyousness that I experienced firsthand at an Indian wedding at The University of Michigan in 2003. The conjunction of the articulation of the characters and the liveliness of the costumes, music, and dancing created a rewarding atmosphere. Was the family Brahman, I wonder. The distinction between the castes in the movie was palpable and affecting. I identified most with Ria as an educated woman who wanted to progress beyond the traditional role of wife/servant and complete an M.F.A in writing.

Aditi the bride appeared to be in an enviable position, yet I sympathized with her situation on the line between India’s tradition and America’s “modernism.” There was a warmth between the actors that came through—particularly among Aditi, Ria and their brother, mother and father. Dubey the event coordinator provided comic relief and Alice the maid was a sympathetic soul. I don’t know how this film could have been better. Since I was interested in Ria, her character might have been developed more—her writing character—perhaps overdubbing of her voice reading from the Tagore book to show her passion and depth.

I appreciate the fact that the screenwriter was a woman; critic Emma French states, “Sabrina Dhawan’s script pulls off the achievement of creating a romantic comedy with real substance and style, conducted in a seamless and realistic mixture of English, Hindi and Punjabi.”*****

Naropa University
7 February 2005

JOANNE KYGER—WRITER OF THE JAPAN AND INDIA JOURNALS

During the Summer Writing Program of 2001, I had the Great opportunity to study with Joanne Kyger. Her workshop—INVESTIGATIVE POETICS—introduced such fellow writers as Ed Sanders, Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn and Alice Notley. We read from Ed Sanders’ 1968: A History in Verse, The House That Jack Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer, Ed Dorn’s epic poem “Gunslinger,” and Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses. Joanne repeated Spicer’s notion that poetry is a form of magic, most potent when spoken aloud. Joanne also told us about Spicer’s Poetry As Magic workshop that included Robert Duncan. She would probably approve of this statement made by Spicer in 1949 :

Live poetry is a kind of singing.
It differs from prose, as song does,
in its complexity of stress and intonation.
Poetry demands a human voice to sing it
and demands an audience to hear it.
Without these it is naked, pure,
and incompletely - a bore.*[1]

Joanne Kyger was born in 1934 & attended Santa Barbara College. One day in January 1957 she drove up to San Francisco with [her] Siamese cat. She arrived at the height of the Howl obscenity trial, and a friend introduced her to The Place, the bar that was headquarters for Jack Spicer and other poets of the San Francisco Renaissance. She attended the Sunday Meetings lead by Spicer and Robert Duncan and gave her first reading at the Bread and Wine Mission in 1959 before moving to Japan with Gary Snyder. Joanne and Gary married in Japan, living there & also travelling to India (with Allen Ginsberg and Peter Orlofsky), events that are chronicled in Kyger's Japan and India Journals 1960-64. Kyger returned to San Francisco and published her first book The Tapestry and The Web. She moved to Bolinas in 1968 where she continues to reside, writing poetry, editing the local newspaper, and teaching (here) at Naropa University.[2]

Joanne Kyger’s writings include:

Phenomenological
Some Sketches from the Life of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky
All This Everyday
Mexico Blonde
The Japan and India Journals
As Ever[3]
Just Space: Poems 1979-1989
Again: Poems 1989-2000

In my copy of The Japan and India Journals, which Joanne signed, she also inscribed this message: “Write in your journal…
Everyday!”

[1] http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88v/spicer-bio.html
[2] http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/kyger/
[3] http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2003spring/kyger.shtml






*********************************************************
Bhanu Kapil, one of my teachers at Naropa, has allowed me to post
a poem that she wrote with Jack Collom, another teacher at Naropa.

*********************************************************


BREAKFAST ON A FOREIGN BALCONY

Hand-whipped water buffalo cream
Right down the gullet

A grizzle of whiskey in a cup
Filters through my mustache, heart, toes

I'm strong enough, perhaps, to massage the sky
But only in another country

Describe the coffee, there in the architecture
The coffee outlines the hand-cut tiles, with sensuous precision

Are we in the middle of an orange?
Espresso and tangerines for breakfast on a balcony

Are we near the sea? Is this Kolkata?
Or is this a synapse in the great dirt molecule?

Look, there's something flying overhead--
It's a real live animal - oh my god

Where I lived there were dark green hills
Shuddering in the whirl of the seasons

The animal lands. We speak. It says,
"Can I provide you with a dairy beverage for your tea?"

We clink our cups with our spoons
We smile. Each tooth is intricately carved

Meanwhile Evolution leans this way and that:
Means it's time for the waterbuffaloes to squirt their cream directly
into our coffee

*************************************************************

THE THEORETICAL POST-COLONIAL HOUSE

We formed groups of three and conceptualized the post-colonial house.

B called it cartoon-like; I didn’t see it that way until she said it.

A class likes it when a teacher sticks a piece of scotch tape on her eyelid.

One group drew an accordion; another drew heart-shaped chambers.

Still another group drew a house floating over an abyss.

“What will happen if the house falls,” B asked the group.

“The survivors will have to build along the sides,” S said.

The bridge in the house I drew is love and it is indeed reddish.

Connect! Connect! I can hear my friend Seth yelling. Not literally.

It is an avant-garde bridge that plays the part of suspension of disbelief

Over a void in which J drew a contraption like the one in the movie Contact.

I saw a picture in mind of Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Falling Water.

J wanted to know how post-colonial architecture

Is different from his parent’s house. It’s different because his parents didn’t

Have post-colonial architecture in mind when they built their house.

The house is precariously situated over a river, the living room jutting out beyond

Its rock foundation. The Wright house I painted is green. The river is grey.

The way the house’s weight is distributed appears to defy gravity.

There is a Planetarium of the Unknown and peppermint/permanent footprints.

The Planetarium is sky blue and the footprints are lavender.

Things inside the house are wrapped like diapers in a package with no dust.

J suggested an immortal house exists whereby the house is preserved forever;

The same way that human bodies might be preserved by cryogenics.

I felt it was important to include a library/theater/memory.